Kenya is the largest producer of tea in Africa and in 1999 was the fourth in the world, behind India, China and Sri Lanka. Black tea is the main source of foreign farm in Kenya. Production in 1999 reached 220,000 tons. The tea exports were valued approximately $ 404.1 million in 2001, or about 18% of total exports.

Agriculture today is the most important economic activity in Kenya, even if less than 8% of its land is used for crops and grazing. Less than 20% of the land is suitable for agriculture, of which only 12% is classified as high agricultural potential (adequate rainfall) and about 8% of the soil as medium potential. The rest of the territory is arid or semi-arid. About 80% of the workforce is engaged in agriculture or in the production of food.

The UN FAO Africover Project generated the most recent land cover map for Central-Eastern African countries in the early 2000s, but since then, population growth and major policy changes have caused land use to shift to increased agro-pastoralism and systematic expansion of cropland area, spurring the need for updated maps of cropped areas.

The project foresees training sessions for students from the University of Nairobi and University of Rome and field campaigns.
The last one has been conducted in August 2015 and a second one has been planned for 2016.

The project aims at developing an infrastructure HW/SW, as much automatic as possible, capable of exploiting the currently free available high resolution satellite images for producing periodic maps of the agricultural areas of the country.

Agricultural land cover maps are critical for monitoring the current conditions and long‐term changes of crop and pasture lands.

The UN FAO Africover Project generated the most recent high resolution land cover map for Central-Eastern African countries in the early 2000s, but since then, population growth and major policy changes have caused land use to shift to increased agro-pastoralism and systematic expansion of cropland area, spurring the need for updated maps of cropped areas.

Consequently, EO data have tremendous value for monitoring crop condition and production, and for providing data necessary for developing food security and early warning systems.

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Università di Roma 'La Sapienza' have recently signed an agreement concerning the activities to be carried out at Broglio Space Center (BSC) of Malindi (Kenya).

In the framework of this agreement ASI has funded some research/training projects on topics of interest for both Italian and Kenyan institutions. The list of themes of interest includes: programs of higher education, radar systems and space sensors development, satellite data acquisition, telemedicine, remote sensing.

System Implementation and Capacity Building for Satellite Based Agricultural Monitoring and Crop Statistics in Kenya

SBAM project deals with a Italian-Kenyan initiative aiming at exploiting the combined use of optical and radar satellite data to retrieve bio-physical characteristics of crops.

The synergistic use of high resolution radar and multispectral optical data (considering the lack of satellite hyperspectral data until 2017) will be exploited for:

developing a validated methods for the satellite based estimate and update of the agricultural areas in the region of Central-Africa;

developing methods and products allowing the assessment of the crops status in test areas (Kenya) by combining ground and satellite data;

implementing an automated process chain capable to periodically provide agricultural land cover maps of the area of interest and possible an estimate of the crop yield.

Thanks to the possibility of exploiting ESA (European Space Agency) CAT_01 opportunities, in this project we will try to use, beside the Landsat and Sentinel-2 images (30 m and 20 m spatial resolution, respectively), high resolution RapidEye imagery (5 m spatial resolution) to map the current extent of agricultural areas.

The remote sensing-based agricultural monitoring system developed in the framework of this project will, hopefully, expand and enhance the Kenyan Government's capability to monitor crop conditions and forecast food shortages and famines.